Craig spotted this article about the death of Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, a pioneer in the development of LCD. Mr De Gennes won the 1991 Nobel Prize for Physics for groundbreaking work in liquid crystals and polymers, for which some of the judges accorded him the accolade of "the Isaac Newton of our time". He died on Friday.

Shane noted that the National Archives is opening up its WW1 records for access over the web, they also have a podcast. Records of men and women who served with the Australian army in World War I are preserved in the National Archives. In a three-year preservation project, we have digitized 376,000 of these service records. As a gift to the nation, these records are all available online.

Justin sent in this article about a 3D air mouse which you wear as a ring. MagicMouse, a three-dimensional ultrasonic computer mouse designed by a team of five WPI undergraduates, is one of 10 inventions honored with the inaugural PopSci Invention Awards, the cover story in the June 2007 issue of Popular Science.

According to Tweaktown Quicktime causes problems with RAID in Vista. System is Vista Ultimate 32-bit with RAID 10 on Intel ICH8R chipset. A couple of weeks ago I tried running a .mov file using Apple QuickTime software (latest version) and that is when things started to go downhill. The file seemed very slow to load and eventually QuickTime crashed after a lot of persuasion. Once QuickTime was closed, I was notified of a RAID error through the Intel Matrix Storage Console but the same thing will happen if you reboot during the lockup as well.

Australain Unis have applauded Google after they banned ads for essay writing services for students. Australian universities have applauded Google's decision to ban advertisers spruiking essay-writing services for lazy students. In a global change to its AdWords policy, announced today, Google said it would "disallow ad texts and sites that promote academic paper-writing services and the sale of pre-written essays, theses, and dissertations".

Guitar Hero 3 has been officially announced. After inadvertantly revealing the existence of Guitar Hero III on their website, RedOctane and Activision have officially announced the next title in the popular franchise. As expected, the game will be coming to the PS2, PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii this fall and it will be developed by Neversoft.

CNet have taken a look at the demand for Vista and if it is boosting PC sales. It's a natural question to ask, but a difficult one to answer. One reason it's hard to suss out Vista's impact on PC sales is that consumers don't really decide whether they prefer a new operating system. When Microsoft releases a new operating system, it becomes the default on nearly all machines sold at retail stores. So if consumers want a new PC, they basically get Vista.

A rehabilitation hospital is using the Nintendo Wii to help with its patients with movement and balance issues. Patients like Liaw, 34, play games in front of a TV screen, swinging a virtual golf stick, scoring a virtual bowling strike or knocking out an opponent in a boxing match without suffering a single bruise. Dr. Grigore Burdea, a world leader in computer-based virtual reality techniques in rehabilitation therapies, believes that in five years every hospital and rehab clinic will have embraced the gaming technology for their patients.

ZDNet have posted 5 + 3 crucial things the Linux community doesn't understand about the average PC user. Why is it that the average computer user still chooses to spend hundreds of dollars on Windows or Mac when there are countless Linux alternatives that they could download, install and make use of completely free of charge?